News - page 1517

When the first colorful shells for the so-called budget iPhone first started leaking, they seemed like they were probably fake. Surely, Apple would find some other way to skimp on their new low-end iPhone build price than by casing it all in cheapish plastic in a Froot Loop pallette of colors.

But it’s starting to look like there’s a lot of smoke for no fire, with another leak out of the Far East showing the budget iPhone in red, yellow, white, blue and green. These are starting to look real: budget iPhones with a 4-inch Retina Display that are about 2-3mm thicker than current devices, and will end the fragmentation between 3.5-inch and 4-inch displays among Apple’s for-sale iPhone range when the budget iPhones go free on contract.

What do you think of the budget iPhone’s look? Let us know in the comments.

Source: Apple Daily
Via: Slashgear

There’s a fair few accessories that put an iDevice charging cable on your keychain, but I think I like Bluelounge’s Kii the most, in that it’s actually housed in a key. It’s pricy, though: $20 will get you the 30 pin model, but if you have an iPhone or iPad with a Lightning connector, it’ll cost you twice as much to have a charge-and-sync cable that you’re always drunkenly trying to thrust into your house lock.

Source: Bluelounge
Via: Gizmodo

Although Apple beefed up the MacBook Air line at WWDC last month with new ultrabooks packing Intel’s Haswell processors, they have yet to upgrade the venerable MacBook Pro with the same technology. That’s a bummer, because Haswell can greatly improve battery life without sacrificing speed… surely the kind of tech you’d want in a Retina MacBook Pro.

We still don’t know when we’ll see the MBP line updated, but it’s looking like it might be happening soon, with new benchmark results for a next-gen 15-inch MacBook Pro popping up on a community benchmarking site.

Apple finally allows us to put the Newsstand icon in a folder in iOS 7, but wouldn’t it be great if we could completely hide all the built-in apps we don’t use? Thanks to a glitch in the latest iOS 7 beta, you can. After following a few simple steps, you can remove stock icons from your home screen so that they’re nowhere to be seen.

The Pandora app for iOS has today been updated with a number of new features that promise to make your listening experience all the more pleasurable. In addition to improved playback buffering, there’s a new automatic pause feature, Pandora URL support, and more.

If you obsess over even the tiniest speck of grease or dust on your camera lens, then you should probably avoid this video, which shows a poor Canon 50mm ƒ1.8 standard prime being tortured. And I do mean it when I say “tortured”: Evil photographer Richard Choi really gets elemental on that front element. The surprise? The lens (almost) doesn’t feel a thing.

Diamond Scale is what looks like a kind of fake novelty app which purports to turn you iDevice into a scale. The best thing is to just describe it to you.

The little drilled aluminum Braven 650 is one of my favorite portable Bluetooth speakers – it’s small, it’s light and tough and it sounds great. Plus, it’s a lot louder than the Jambox, and it has a USB port so that you can recharge your iPhone from the speaker’s battery.

So I have high expectations for the new 850. If the 650 was a competitor to the Jambox, the 850 is a rival for the Big Jambox

Do you snap pictures for your blog using your iPhone, and then do the actual blog writing on your Mac? Or some other combination of devices? Then PUPS is for you. It’s a new iPhone app from the makers of crash-happy blogging app Blogsy, and it has one purpose – to upload pictures from your iDevice to your blog’s media library.

Ever wonder just how much light a polarizer filter cuts out from your photos? You can easily see the effect in the viewfinder as your turn the filter and see the reflections disappear, but what if you could take a photo of the light it cuts out?

Sounds impossible? Not if you use math… and Photoshop.

Garmin has just announced a neat new HUD box that takes the map info from your iPhone and projects it up onto your car windshield. Named after the Paul Newman character in the movie of the same name[1], the HUD is designed to work with Garmin’s Navigon and Street Pilot apps, connecting to the host phone via Bluetooth.

Following the release of the iOS 7 beta 3 this morning, Apple has also released the third preview of OS X 10.9 Mavericks to developers this evening. The new preview comes two weeks after Apple released the second beta for Mavericks.

The  new release doesn’t contain any major new features, but focus mostly on bug fixes and performance. In an email to developers, Apple encourage beta testers to: haven’t discovered any major changes in the Mavericks preview 3 yet,

“Take advantage of new features, like APIs that optimize the new energy saving technologies in OS X Mavericks, as well as new AV Kit frameworks, Sprite Kit, Map Kit, and many powerful additions to existing frameworks.

Here are the release notes:

Spiderweb Software is an independent game developer based in Seattle. It’s been in operation since 1993, when it released its first game, Exile: Escape from the Pit, an old school RPG with tons of plot, dialogue, and fantasy storytelling.

Now in its twentieth year, Spiderweb continues the indie role playing game genre it’s been developing for the past two decades by releasing its twenty-first game, Avadon 2: The Corruption.

By now you’ve probably caught wind of the short list of great apps that’ve gone free in celebration of the App Store’s fifth anniversary (if you haven’t grabbed these apps yet, take a look now before all the free ends).

Missing from that list of free apps is Localscope, a fantastic navigation and discovery tool that Apple called the best navigation app of 2011.

Nothing screams “summer!” like a bag full of beer and ice. The messenger-bag gurus at Timbuk2 know this, and have re-clad and re-released their stealthy party-in-a-bag bag, the Dolores Chiller Messenger — this time in Pilsner Urquell’s signature green and white colors.

You may be asking “can’t I just dump all the stuff out of my own messenger bag and fill it with beer and ice?” Why no, you can’t. Your bag’s interior isn’t insulated; and more importantly, your bag doesn’t come with a handy bottle opener.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is on the list of guests expected to attend the annual Sun Valley conference in Idaho this week.

The conference is held by New York-based investment bank Allen & Co., and hosts over 300 industry leaders participate in panels on politics, business, tech and more over a four day period. It’s basically a place for some of the most powerful business people in the U.S. to figure out how to become more powerful as they hangout and try to strike up business deals.

Apple released the third beta of iOS 7 to developers this morning, and even though it doesn’t come with any big new features, the new update has plenty of small fixes and encouraging UI refinements.

Here are six GIFS of the biggest UI tweaks Apple made in the new beta:

The ability to jump into iTunes and download practically any major motion picture ever created is just one of the many reasons why the iPhone and iPad have become so successful, but a Florida lawyer claims Apple’s HD video rentals are actually a scam.

According to a class action lawsuit filed this June by Scott Weiselberg at the San Francisco federal court, Apple may have violated consumer production laws and deceived customers into paying $1 more for HD videos by serving up HD versions of iTunes video rentals on iOS devices that don’t support HD video.

Twitter is continuing to refine its Mac and iOS apps with a new update that brings direct message notification syncing and a host of other features. Now when you view a DM on your iPhone, Mac, iPad or Android or Twitter.com, all other devices with your account info will be updated to show that you’ve read the message.

The new Twitter update for iPhone and iPad also features a new reply composer to make it even easier to join conversations on Twitter. There’s also a new “People” button to help users find new accounts to follow and a ton of bug fixes.

Here are the full release notes:

As the App Store’s 5th birthday approaches this Wednesday Apple has decided to run a special promotion to celebrate all the incredible apps that have made the iPhone and iPad so successful.

“From the 500 apps available at launch in 2008 to more than 900,000 at your fingertips today, it’s been a remarkably prolific five years for the App Store. To celebrate, we’re giving everyone five landmark games and five groundbreaking apps for a limited time. Plus, look back at the key moments that have made the App Store the world’s most innovative destination for apps.”

iOS users looking for the freebies can go to the App Store to find the promotional page that offers the five landmark games and five groundbreaking apps that we mentioned earlier this morning. Apple also published a timeline on the page to commemerate the milestones the App Store has enjoyed over the past five years.

Two weeks after releasing the second iOS 7 beta,  Apple has seeded iOS 7 beta 3 to developers along with a third preview of Xcode 5. The new beta build of iOS 7 (11A4414e) is available for both iPhone and iPad as an OTA update, or you can download it directly from the Dev Center.

Here are the full release notes:

There’s nothing wrong with the default unlock animation on iOS, but having lived with it for six years, it’s nice to have a change. With LiveWire Pro, a new tweak for jailbroken iPhones, you can choose from seven different unlock animations and quickly switch to another when you fancy a change.

Today is the day Strobists have been longing for. Why? It’s the official launch day for the LumoPro LP180 flash, an amazingly capable little (or not-so-little) flashgun which costs way less than the equivalents from the likes of Canon and Nikon.

Apple is gearing up to launch its fifth-generation iPad this September, according to sources in its supply chain. The device is expected to offer a new form factor much like the iPad mini’s, as well as some backlighting modifications and better battery life.

We may have to wait a little longer for the second-generation iPad mini, however. The sources claim Apple is still deciding whether to bring a Retina display to the 7.85-inch device, and if it does, the launch could be delayed until “the end of the fourth quarter.”

In late April, Yahoo released a gorgeously designed new Weather app for iOS. Pretty much everyone loved the new Yahoo! Weather app, except for one thing: the purple logo.

“Officially the ugliest icon ever,” said one Twitter user in response to the app’s announcement. “Its icon isn’t home page worthy,” said another. Some used their available Twitter character counts to criticize the icon with even more ruthless efficiency: “That icon is ass.”

The icon was such a bust that less than a month later, Yahoo made the extraordinary move of replacing the logo with one that was even uglier. Despite this, the new mark was widely hailed as an improvement. Yet just last week, Yahoo updated its official Weather app again, and surprise! The original logo is back, with not a whiff of controversy.

Here’s why everyone hated the Yahoo! Weather app icon… and why Jony Ive and iOS 7 might have helped the design eventually get accepted by iPhone users at large.

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